Siona Benjamin, a Sephardic
Jewish artist from Bombay (her ancestors came to India from the Middle
East and perhaps Spain centuries ago), was educated in both Zoroastrian
and Catholic schools while growing up in predominantly Hindu and Muslim
India.

Living and working in the
United States today, her recent work raises questions about her diasporic
and multicultural identities in ways that intersect with questions feminists
have posed both about the absence of women artists and, more recently,
of Jewish women artists, from centuries of exhibitions and mainstream
art history. At the same time that it raises questions about the tensions
faced by a multicultural woman artist, it resolves many apparent contradictions
via the stunning, original images created — images that reconcile the
disparate spiritual and aesthetic tendencies of her multicultural heritage.
While empowering the multicultural woman artist, Siona’s art avoids all
transgression of spiritual laws concerning the relationship between art
and the sacred found in the teachings of her intersecting spiritual traditions.

While feminist art historical
scholarship in the West has begun to analyse the sexual politics concerning
the exclusion of women artists from patriarchal scholarly narratives,
Siona Benjamin’s artistic emergence in American art at this moment is
rendered more complex by the recognition that Jewish artists have also
encountered the serious prohibition of the Bible’s Second Commandment
against the making of graven images, and consequently were discouraged
from expressing themselves creatively in the visual arts. Thus, Siona
Benjamin belongs to the first generation in history in which there is
a movement of Jewish women artists, whose participants reflect upon the
relationship between Judaism and iconic art-making as well as upon the
contrasting gender representations of women in Indian and American fine
and popular arts.

While most Jewish artists
have experienced western art history as primarily Christian, and Jewish
women artists have experienced western art history as both Christian and
androcentric, Siona Benjamin’s artistic training in Bombay was deeply
informed by Hinduism as well as by her close study of Indian miniature
paintings and Byzantine icons, all contrasting with the Jewish religious
art of her childhood in different ways.

Siona’s Jewish-Hindu feminist
iconography makes a radical breakthrough in harmonising the contradictions
and polarities presented by these various traditions, for it pioneers
an original multicultural imagery at the confluence of artistic and spiritual
traditions that are often in conflict with each other. While Hindu art
is based upon the ritual making of icons energised with the spirit of
the deities to whom the art work is consecrated, and while sacred rituals
are involved in the process of art-making as well as in the worship of
the deity whose presence is invoked by the Hindu icon, Jewish art prohibits
both the making and/or the worship of such iconic images. Thus, while
experiencing both colonial and androcentric western aesthetic influences,
and simultaneously undergoing training in a tradition of non-western art
that involves the ritual invocation of deities to be revered through spiritual
devotions, Siona’s birth religion, Judaism, forbade her to make ‘graven’
images, or to engage in any practice that would involve the evocation
or worship of ‘other gods’.

Siona often wondered whether
a painted image was the same thing as a graven image. She would ask herself
whether a Jewish woman with artistic talent, raised in a Hindu country,
should forego serious artmaking because it might be in conflict with Jewish
law. For many years, she pondered how a woman artist with a hybrid identity,
inheriting such extremely diverging aesthetic legacies, might approach
artmaking. These were some of the problems Siona Benjamin confronted as
she began her studies of art. At first she explored abstraction, as did
many other Jewish artists — in order to avoid the problem of the graven
image.

Siona
studied both enamelling and theatre and set design as well as the
fine arts. She had always been interested in Indian miniature art,
and did her undergraduate thesis in India on Indian miniatures,
which, of course, focused on Hinduism. It wasn’t until she was living
in the United States, where she attended graduate school, and when
she started a family of her own, that she began to seek ways in
which to incorporate the Jewish influences from her childhood into
the paintings she was creating in the context of her new family
setting

Siona spoke to me movingly
of how she grew up surrounded by icon-worshippers, but was raised in Indian
synagogues from which icon-worship was absolutely banished. Yet, intensely
sensitive to the beauty of Hindu art, Siona experienced a profound tension
between an aesthetic opening to the images of her native India, and her
spiritual conviction that by making such icons, she would surrender her
Jewishness and become Hindu.

For many years she felt isolated
as a Jew in India, and often wished that she belonged to the majority,
rather than a minority religion in her country. However, she did not experience
anti-semitism in India. On the contrary, she was told stories about how,
when the Jews first came to India, they were welcomed warmly. When the
Jews did leave India for Israel, it was not because of persecution or
intolerance, but because Israel offered them jobs and excellent educational
opportunities. Many members of Siona’s family migrated to Israel, too,
but her parents remained in India. There, she was educated in Catholic
schools, because of the fine education in English that they provided,
but she was advised not to take communion or to engage in any Christian
religious rituals.

Siona studied both enamelling
and theatre and set design as well as the fine arts. She had always been
interested in Indian miniature art, and did her undergraduate thesis in
India on Indian miniatures, which, of course, focused on Hinduism. It
wasn’t until she was living in the United States, where she attended graduate
school, and when she started a family of her own, that she began to seek
ways in which to incorporate the Jewish influences from her childhood
into the paintings she was creating in the context of her new family setting.

From 1996 to the present,
she sought an artistic reconciliation of her two loves, Indian miniature
painting and Judaism. As seemingly irreconcilable as the premises of artistic
creation in these two traditions appeared to be, Siona was determined
to discover a kind of imagery that would celebrate the richness of both
traditions. As she explored her Jewish identity, she also recognised the
multiculturalism within the Jewish tradition, with its Sephardic, Ashkenazic,
and converso histories — all of which lead to still more cultural
diversity within and among the Jewish people.

Eventually, Siona Benjamin
began to question all aspects of her diverse identities, particularly
in her series entitled Finding Home. Working in the United States
in the eighties and nineties, she also incorporated the feminist focus
upon the depiction of empowered women into her art, and she explored the
visual renditions and symbolism of female energy and power in her women
figures, referencing Indian tantric art and goddesses in many of her works.

One image from her Finding
Home series (#28) depicts an Indian woman in blue jeans, seated in
a traditional Indian miniature landscape, sipping a Coke. An angel at
the back carries her mother’s Sabbath lamp — the one her mother used to
make, ritually, out of oil and a wick to celebrate the Sabbath every Friday
night, while other women simply used candles. In the background, the house
says Mother in Hebrew. It represents the home she was leaving when she
emigrated to the US. There is, however, a demon on top of the painting
with a gun and a nuclear weapon, suggesting the wars that are raging everywhere,
and the threat of nuclear war that may, eventually, disrupt this peaceful
scene. The background was inspired by a sari design of a richly brocaded
Indian fabric with the Shema Israel prayer ("Hear, O Israel! The
Lord is our God, and God is one") embroidered on its border.

As an autobiographical portrait
of her multiple identities, this contemporary woman artist locates herself
in an Indian setting, but through the long straw, which suggests a hookah,
she is imbibing the intoxicating American elixir/poison, Coca Cola, symbolising
the lure of the West, which will draw her to reside in the US, and may
further corrupt the values inherent in the spirituality suggested by the
settings of the Indian miniature. However, she guarantees the presence
of the sacred in her life in the West by depicting the protective presence
of an angel, who, in transporting her mother’s Sabbath lamp, insures that
her Jewish spiritual identity will travel with her to her new home. She
is seated on a magic carpet, which is framed in gold like a work of art,
and the entire scene is set within the protective border of the central
Hebrew prayer proclaiming her belief in the existence of the monotheistic
God of Israel.